High-tech treatments

Water, wastewater facilities use technology to do more with less

By Chip Taulbee

A wide array of new technologies are being used in water and wastewater treatment plant upgrades across the south central region to make the water cleaner and the facilities' aroma rosier.

The O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant in Ridgeland, Miss., and the Five Mile Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Birmingham, Ala., will use ultraviolet rays for disinfection. Also, the Ridgeland plant will be the first immersed membrane plant in Mississippi treating surface water.

Contractors are also finding out these upgrades can get tricky if the facilities are old and their drawings not always exact. As general contractor Brasfield & Gorrie LLC of Birmingham, Ala., can attest, the upgrades are always easier when you are the contractor who built it in the first place.

O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant, Ridgeland, Miss. Brasfield & Gorrie began a $42.7 million expansion in April on the Ridgeland water treatment plant it originally built in 1989.

Fortunately, the owner - the city of Jackson - anticipated the expansion.

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"When we built the original job, a lot of the work we did there was made to accommodate or facilitate this type of an upgrade," said Brasfield & Gorrie project manager Scott Sheumaker.

The addition of a submerged membrane filtration system will double the plant's capacity to 50 million gallons per day.

Brasfield & Gorrie will also make modifications to the plant's existing deep-bed filter system. The job includes enclosing the high-service pump station, a block building with a structural steel frame and adding another enclosed high service pump station.

The project, not a particularly large concrete job for a treatment plant, will include about 16,400 cu. yds. of concrete. There will be plenty of new piping, however. The job calls for about 2 mi. of ductile iron yard pipe and 8.5 mi. of small-diameter pipe.

The plant will also get more than 70 new pumps of various sizes, some with as much as 800 hp.

The project is a joint venture with Dixon Interior Finishings of Jackson, Miss., and will be completed in December.

Central Wastewater Treatment Plant Biosolids Management Facility, Nashville. Archer-Western Contractors Ltd. of Atlanta began work in November on Nashville's $117 million biosolids management facility at the Central Wastewater Treatment Plant, which will be complete in three years.

The new facility will turn solid waste into a pellet fertilizing product "and all but eliminate the odor source from the facility," Archer-Western project manager Kelley Hadley said.

Archer-Western, who was contracted by Nashville's Central Water Services for the design-build project, has hired the local architecture firm Barge, Wagner, Sumner & Cannon Inc. to research the surrounding historical Germantown area and find matching brick colors and other features for the facility.

Running adjacent to the eight-acre site will be a biking and walking trail dotted with trees and other greenery.

So far, Archer-Western has removed countless buried bricks at the site, which were part of a brick manufacturing plant that once stood there. The new facility is going to primarily be constructed on a foundation of H-piles driven into the bedrock.

The project will include four dissolved air-flotation thickeners along with associated control buildings; five digesters with an associated control room building; and a 50,000-sq.-ft. biosolids drying facility, which is the largest structure onsite.

Archer-Western will use primarily concrete slabs-on-grade with a structural steel skeleton and precast panels with built-up roofing, except for an administration building that connects to the drying facility, which will have a standing seam roof structure.

Dry Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, Nashville. Four engineers designed the Nashville, Tenn., treatment plant's upgrades as four separate jobs. Instead, but Brasfield & Gorrie got the $38.1 million bid for the whole project.

The contractor began work on the plant in July. Upgrades are being made on solids handling, odor control, aeration basin improvements and influent pumping.

"This is a large process mechanical job in that there are a lot of pumps, pipes, mixers," Brasfield & Gorrie's Scott Sheumaker said, citing about 315,000 lbs. of flanged ductile iron pipe on the project.

The plant's old aeration systems and basins are being replaced with diffuser equipment and floating aerators. The plant will also get a new wet-weather pumping station with two 250-hp pumps.

Most of the job's 7,300 cu. yds. of concrete will go into a new digester complex. The plant will also have its existing dewatering facilities refurbished. And new biofilters will treat odors from around the site.

The four-part project was designed by Black and Veatch of Overland Park, Kan.; Brown and Caldwell of Walnut Creek, Calif.; Jordan, Jones & Goulding of Norcross, Ga.; and Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. of Pasadena, Calif.

Five Mile Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant Upgrade, Birmingham, Ala. Local contractor B.L. Harbert International began work in July on the $52.4 million upgrade on the Five Mile Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Birmingham, Ala.

Once the project is complete in July 2008, the decades-old plant will have boosted its capacity from 20 million gallons per day to 30 MDG and peak flow capacity of 45 MGD to 70 MGD.

The plant, which now uses chlorination as a final phase of treatment before the effluent goes into the creek, will use ultraviolet rays as the last line of defense.

A new system control acquisition and data system will allow the plant to be operated through computers that can open and close valves and monitor and make other adjustments throughout the treatment process.

Excavating a hole 50 ft. deep for the new combined headworks and pumping station facility was tricky.

"Since we're in the existing plant the blasting charge has had to be reduced somewhat," Lee said. "And the rock was so hard that some of the rock had to be blasted three and four times to get it to fracture so that we could remove it."

The upgrade also includes two new clarifiers, a new aeration basin, a new holding basin and new sludge drying beds.

Grand Prairie Pumping Station, DeValls Bluff, Ark. Arkansas' Alluvial Aquifer has been going down for years and if something is not done it will be commercially useless by 2015.

So the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contracted Granite Construction Co. of Lewisville, Texas, to build a pumping station in DeValls Bluff that will not only save the aquifer but also save the area's farming.

Corps officials said the project will use excess surface water and water from the White River to supplement a network of on-farm tailwater recovery systems. The systems will also fill on-farm reservoirs that store the water, which will also provide some irrigation.

A six-pump, electric pumping station will move the water from the White River. Granite Construction began work on the station last June and should finish in December 2007 or January 2008.

The $34.9 million station will pump 1,600 cu. ft. per second.